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Let us now take wage-labour.

The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that

quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely

requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the

wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely

suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no

means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the

products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the

maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no

surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we

want to do away with, is the miserable character of this

appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase

capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of

the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase

accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is

but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the

labourer.